privatecloud

A bit of an over-statement. What they want to say is “lots of new computing from IoT and pocket devices,” or something.

“many new applications have to act fast. According to some estimates, self-driving cars generate as much as 25 gigabytes per hour, nearly 30 times more than a high-definition video stream. Before so many data are uploaded, and driving instructions sent back, the vehicle may well already have hit that pedestrian suddenly crossing the street.”
Original source: The era of the cloud’s total dominance is drawing to a close – Life on the edge

This is especially true in “industrial Internet of Things” applications, where the likes of ABB and GE collect data from sensors on their equipment and analyze it to help with things like predictive maintenance and capacity planning. Often, for performance and/or security reasons, the compute gear that does the analytics is placed directly on oil rigs, power plants, factory floors, in mines, and so on. Sometimes it’s connected to the cloud, and sometimes it isn’t.

“The message from our customers was, ‘We will only start this journey with you if you can put all the infrastructure we need on our premises, isolated from the internet, so we can be assured of security, of governance, of adequate latency for decision making,’” Ciaran Flanagan, group VP and head of ABB’s Global Datacenter business, said. He predicted that for industrial IoT, between 60 percent and 70 percent of processing, transactions, and data management is going to happen at the edge.Link to original

This is especially true in “industrial Internet of Things” applications, where the likes of ABB and GE collect data from sensors on their equipment and analyze it to help with things like predictive maintenance and capacity planning. Often, for performance and/or security reasons, the compute gear that does the analytics is placed directly on oil rigs, power plants, factory floors, in mines, and so on. Sometimes it’s connected to the cloud, and sometimes it isn’t.

“The message from our customers was, ‘We will only start this journey with you if you can put all the infrastructure we need on our premises, isolated from the internet, so we can be assured of security, of governance, of adequate latency for decision making,’” Ciaran Flanagan, group VP and head of ABB’s Global Datacenter business, said. He predicted that for industrial IoT, between 60 percent and 70 percent of processing, transactions, and data management is going to happen at the edge.Link to original

“private cloud can be a less expensive option for enterprises than public cloud. Forty-one percent of 150 IT decision-makers surveyed in February 2017 as part of a custom 451 Research project for VMware claimed to be operating their own private clouds at lower unit costs than public cloud.”Link to original

This week, Big Blue rolled out its new IBM Cloud Private software platform that is designed to enable enterprises to develop on-premises private cloud environments to accelerate app development and allow for easier movement of workloads between their private clouds and public clouds – not only the IBM Cloud but also those from other vendors. Similarly, IBM is leaning on open and container-based technologies for enhanced integration and portability of workloads. The IBM Cloud Private platform is built on Kubernetes, an open-source technology for container orchestration, and will support both Docker containers and Cloud Foundry framework.

More:

IBM Cloud Private can run on a variety of infrastructures, including the vendor’s own mainframe and Power systems, its hyperconverged infrastructure that runs Nutanix software, and IBM Storage’s Spectrum Access solution. In addition, it can run on systems from Dell EMC, Lenovo, Cisco Systems and NetApp, and can be deployed by such VMware, Canonical and other OpenStack distributions as well as bare-metal systems. The private cloud platform also includes such developer services for data analytics as Db2, Db2 Warehouse, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, developer tools like Netcool, UrbanCode, and Cloud Brokerage and open-source management software such as Jenkins, Prometheus, Grafana, and ElasticSearch.

“The company builds its apps in Docker containers. Apps that need to stay on the company’s premises run on an OpenStack private cloud. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are used for public cloud. Fidelity uses a combination of cloud-native management tools like CloudFormation for AWS, Heat templates for OpenStack, and Terraforms, which runs across both public and private environments. It uses Cloud Foundry as a PaaS layer that spans both public and private clouds, too.”

451 Research’s data points suggest that some workloads are likely to remain on private cloud regardless of any disruptor’s attack. And even with hungry cloud providers eyeing private workloads, growth is likely to continue across all cloud models, not just public cloud.

Whole bunch of survey numbers tryin’ figure out how many workloads will stay on private cloud.

There’s not really any qualitative (market share, penetration, or surveys – all pretty easy to lmgtfy) bits here, but I’d take it more as a slightly eyebrow raising thing along the lines of “if even TechCrunch wiffs out private cloud, maybe there’s some fire there.”

Azure Stack is made of two basic components, the underlying infrastructure that customers purchase from one of Microsoft’s certified partners (initially Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo) and software that is licensed from Microsoft.The software includes basic IaaS functions that make up a cloud, such as virtual machines, storage and virtual networking. Azure Stack includes some platform-as-a-service (PaaS) application-development features including the Azure Container Service and Microsoft’s Azure Functions serverless computing software, plus MySQL and SQL Server support. It comes with Azure Active Directory for user authentication.Customers also have access to a wide range of third-party apps from the Azure Marketplace, including OS images from companies like Red Hat and SuSE, and templates that can be installed to run programs like Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes and Mesosphere.On the hardware side, Azure Stack runs on a hyperconverged infrastructure stack that Microsoft and its hardware vendors have certified. The smallest production-level Azure Stack deployment is a four-server rack with three physical switches and a lifecycle management server host. Individual racks can scale up to 12 servers, and eventually, multiple racks can be scaled together. Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo are initial launch partners. Cisco plans to offer a certified Azure Stack platform based on its UCS hardware line by the end of 2017 and Huawei will roll out Azure Stack support by the end of 2018.IDC Data Center Networking Research Analyst Brad Casemore says he believes customers will need to run at least a 10 Gigabit Ethernet cabling with dual-port mixing. Converged network interface cards, support for BGP and data center bridging are important too. Microsoft estimates that a full-sized, 12-rack server unit of Azure Stack can supply about 400 virtual machines with 2 CPUs and 7 GB of RAM, with resiliency.

And Lydia explains the “people want private cloud ¯_(ツ)_/¯” angle:

“This is definitely a plus in the Microsoft portfolio,” says Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst Lydia Leong, but she says it’s not right for every customer. “I don’t think this is a fundamental game-changer in the dynamics of the IaaS market,” she notes, but “this is going to be another thing to compel Microsoft-centric organizations to use Azure.”

Leong expects this could be beneficial for customers who want to use Azure but some reason such as regulations, data sensitivity, or location of data prevents them from using the public cloud. If a customer has sensitive data they’re not willing to put in the public cloud, they could deploy Azure Stack behind their firewall to process data, then relatively easily interact with applications and data in the public cloud.